The attendees – mainly from all over West Virginia (yay for the great support from the Panhandles!), but also from Ohio and Kentucky – were able to ask questions pertaining to their own social media efforts both planned and in effect.  A huge thank you to the State Journal for putting on the event and everyone that came out.

Seibert then headed off to Columbus, OH the next day to present How to Protect Your Online Reputation at the Digital Media in a Social World conference. If you’re updating your Where’s Waldo maps for Seibert at home, that would mark four separate universities in the last month:

• West Virginia University
• The Ohio State University
• West Liberty University
• University of Charleston

This social media business forum features two speakers from our last series: Jeff James of Mythology Marketing and Justin Seibert of Direct Online Marketing. Jeff and Justin will sit on two panel discussions with a couple other great homegrown speakers, Emily Bennington of Dixon Hughes and Bob Coffield of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso. Other speakers include Karen Saxe of netSpray, Julie Hewett of JulNet, and Kevin Nelson of Huddleston Bolen.

We’ll add another post when we receive registration information.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, keep a lookout for more information from the State Journal, either online or in print.  Hope you can join us!

Mallabo.net offers a look at issues pertaining to social commerce from someone who’s been deeply involved in it from his time at eBay, LinkedIn, and GSI Commerce.  So to read more about what Jose’s been up to – especially if you’re interested in using social media to increase your site’s ecommerce sales, take a look!

Some pretty exciting news on the Next Generation Marketing front.  Well it’s not quite news yet – more like an embryonic news nugget.

Jeff, Skip, and I got on the phone this morning to plan out our next dates.  One thing that looks more or less definite is a stop in Beckley, WV in November.  We’ll post more here and on the main site when this gets locked down and we have more news.

* I just felt like opening with some Spanish today.  Weird – I didn’t even catch any Dora or Diego this morning.  If that’s misspelled or otherwise incorrect, please let me know.  I took Deutsch in high school and college.

Looks like the Marketing Genius blog is back after the hijacking.  That was much quicker than anticipated.  Please continue to enjoy posts from our good friend Skip Lineberg, which resume today.

In the meantime, I wanted to give you an update on 2 items:

1. For a time being we pulled posts from each of the travelling speakers from Next Generation Marketing.  We are no longer doing this, but still encourage you to check out each one individually:

• Direct Online Marketing Blog – Justin Seibert and Paul Woodhouse
• Mythology Marketing Blog – Jeff James
• Marketing Genius – Skip Lineberg and other folks from Maple Creative

2.  You’ll note I didn’t link to Skip’s blog.  We didn’t have a falling out – I still want to give him a great big bear hug every time I see him.  His blog – Marketing Genius – got hacked.  Really tough situation. As soon as the situation gets resolved, I’ll provide an update.

The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It’s really as simple as that, except that the name isn’t strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline. It’s now housed on Ad Age, partly because we thought it’d draw some traffic and links for us, but also because both Todd and Ad Age figured it was a useful service to rank and showcase all these sources of information in one place, where thousands of readers could discover them. With more than 700,000 registered users on our site and a host of daily and weekly products, we also hope we can grow the traffic to Todd’s creation and some of the blogs it highlights.

Methodology
What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it’s already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure. In the case of a tie, individual scores for a blog are weighted in the following order (from highest to lowest):

Todd Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.
Yahoo InLinks (1 to 30): Much like Technorati’s InLinks count, Yahoo uses its Site Explorer to tabulate the number of links to a particular blog. We then scale this number down to a 30-point scale.
Technorati Ranking (1 to 20): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Technorati Authority (1 to 20): Much like the InLinks count, Technorati’s Authority count is the number of blogs (as opposed to individual links) that link to a particular blog. This number is then scale down to a 20-point scale.
Technorati InLinks (1 to 20): Technorati tallies the number of links to a particular blog, and we then scale that number down to a 20-point scale.
Alexa Points (1 to 15): Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). For the Power 150, we take that rank and assign it a proportional score between 1 and 15 and factor it into a blog’s total score.
Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 10): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 15) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.
Collective Intellect (0 to 10): Collective Intellect is a social media analytics company that works with brands to evaluate consumer opinion, measure buzz, identify customer sentiment and manage corporate reputations at the industry, company, brand, campaign and messaging levels. For the Power 150, Collective Intellect’s authority ranking uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate an author’s authority on a topic, including such measures as link-analysis between on-topic posts, topic density, author’s percent of contribution to the topic, number of comments and post quality.

This honor is to be shared by all of you, our entire community of marketing geniuses. It goes to show how important all of you are who comment, contribute, link to, recommend, tag and ‘favorite’ this and other blogs. Thanks! We couldn’t have done it without you.

He’ll be live blogging the conference today to give folks that couldn’t make it – or are waiting to register for Martinsburg – a taste of what we’re discussing.  You won’t get the slides, the free marketing book, a free review of your Web site, the opportunity to network with other Morgantown, WV area marketing professionals, to meet Jeff James or twitter with Skip Lineberg…but it should give you a glimpse of how you can be more effective in your own marketing efforts.

This is good news for everyone except Paul; he hates live blogging (with good reason – it’s hard!).  Maybe he’ll post a picture of himself with a frowny face here to complement the post.  It would complement his “oooh” picture from his live blog of the Southpointe, PA online marketing conference.

1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in how universities market and promote their sports programs since you started out at UConn?

The internet is biggest change. When I started at UConn in ‘93 the internet/email was in the very early stages (if we even had it all – I can’t remember ever using it at UConn in the beginning). Now, it is generally the first medium we think of when deciding how to best promote one of our games/events.

We still promote our events through traditional vehicles, but the internet is the one we think of first. It allows the most flexibility and the best opportunity to hit the most people during the course of a day.

2. How are you moving the WVU athletic department forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?

We are constantly looking at new ideas for our web site. Recently, we have started adding more video features to the site. We receive instant feedback with our web site via the traffic. We can see right away if something we did on there was well received. That is tougher with traditional television, radio or print advertising.

Most of measurement techniques are basic at this point. If it’s web based we look at the page views, unique users and or “click throughs” if it’s a pop up ad or something similar.

We are fortunate that we get most of our feedback about events by looking in the seats at a game. We can tell pretty quickly at a game if our promotion worked or not. I can expand more on this topic at the conference.

3. You mentioned in the last session that you’re moving ticket sales to an all electronic-based system in the near future and that you’ve experienced some resistance to that, particularly with older generations. If you could sit down with one such person, how would you explain why you’re moving these sales to online processing and why it’s a benefit to both them and you?

Great question. I still think it will take us a few years to become fully automated in this area. I think the benefits are the overall ease for the customer. No more waiting on the mail to arrive with the ticket application in there. No more writing out two different checks and sending them back. Click a couple of buttons, put your cc info in and you’re done. No filling out forms, doing the math on how much you owe. It’s all right there.

4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?

Facebook and MySpace I think are extremely interesting applications. It’s amazing to me how many students/people use one or the other. As I mentioned at the Charleston event, I think people have to be careful with this as well. While it can be a great marketing tool (both individually and for groups), people that post to and speak to our athletes about their image and how much one picture on their Facebook page could change the perception of them that is out there.

That said, they can be valuable promotional tools. We had interns post events on both sites this year in an effort to attract people to a soccer game, wrestling meet, etc…

5. You’ve now had the opportunity to speak at one city (Charleston) and listen to a couple of the sessions. Do you think this is the type of event marketers in West Virginia can use to their benefit?

I think these events are great. I think it is invaluable for marketing people to get out of “their world” and share ideas as often as possible. So often I think busy executives get hung up in their day to day duties and don’t have the time to think on a bigger scale. I know I do. It’s amazing how much more creative I feel after sitting in a room with a bunch of other marketing people and throwing around ideas. I think these conferences are outstanding and will only get better as they get more and more participants!

6. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Morgantown and Charleston?

Both have so much to offer. Charleston is great because of the multiple ad agencies, gov’t groups and just the fact it is the capital. Morgantown because of the obvious draw of the University. But, Morgantown gives you more than just the Univ. It has been one of the few areas in West Virginia that continues to grow and thrive. Construction continues at an unbelievable pace. More and more students are coming to the Univ each year only leads to more and more growth in the business community.

Morgantown and Charleston are both vitally important to the growth of our state. I think bringing bright, energetic, talented people together (as these conferences are doing) will benefit not only the individuals, but also the cities in this state and the state as a whole!

In these emails, you will receive ways to get in touch with the speakers in case you had any specific questions you didn’t want to address in a public setting or thought of afterwards. In the meantime, please feel free to learn more about us and join our LinkedIn networks:

• Skip Lineberg on LinkedIn
• Jeff James on LinkedIn
• Justin Seibert on LinkedIn

We look forward to continuing our discussions with you and again thank you for all your attention, contributions, support, and feedback.